The Human Stain

That's the only thing. It doesn't look good for a bird that struts to sing a sweet little song. No, caw your head off. That's the fucking ticket—cawing your head off and frightened of nothing and in there eating everything that's dead. Gotta get a lot of road kill in a day if you want to fly like that. Don't bother to drag it off but eat it right on the road. Wait until the last minute when a car is coming, and then they get up and go but not so far that they can't hop right back and dig back in soon as it's passed. Eating in the middle of the road. Wonder what happens when the meat goes bad. Maybe it doesn't for them. Maybe that's what it means to be a scavenger.

Them and the turkey vultures—that's their job. They take care of all of those things out in the woods and out in the road that we don't want anything to do with. No crow goes hungry in all this world. Never without a meal. If it rots, you don't see the crow run away. If there's death, they're there. Something's dead, they come by and get it. I like that. I like that a lot. Eat that raccoon no matter what. Wait for the truck to come crack open the spine and then go back in there and suck up all the good stuff it takes to lift that beautiful black carcass off the ground. Sure, they have their strange behavior.

Like anything else. I've seen them up in those trees, gathered all together, talking all together, and something's going on. But what it is I'll never know. There's some powerful arrangement there. But I haven't the faintest idea whether they know what it is themselves.

It could be as meaningless as everything else. I'll bet it isn't, though, and that it makes a million fucking times more sense than any fucking thing down here. Or doesn't it? Is it just a lot of stuff that looks like something else but isn't? Maybe it's all just a genetic tic.

Or tock. Imagine if the crows were in charge. Would it be the same shit all over again? The thing about them is that they're all practicality.

In their flight. In their talk. Even in their color. All that blackness.

Nothing but blackness. Maybe I was one and maybe I wasn't. I think I sometimes believe that I already am one. Yes, been believing that on and off for months now. Why not? There are men who are locked up in women's bodies and women who are locked up in men's bodies, so why can't I be a crow locked up in this body? Yeah, and where is the doctor who is going to do what they do to let me out? Where do I go to get the surgery that will let me be what I am?

Who do I talk to? Where do I go and what do I do and how the fuck do I get out?

I am a crow. I know it. I know it!

At the student union building, midway down the hill from North Hall, Coleman found a pay phone in the corridor across from the cafeteria where the Elderhostel students were having their lunch.

He could see inside, through the double doorway, to the long dining tables where the couples were all mingling happily at lunch.

Jeff wasn't at home—it was about 10 A.M. in L.A., and Coleman got the answering machine, and so he searched his address book for the office number at the university, praying that Jeff wasn't off in class yet. What the father had to say to his eldest son had to be said immediately. The last time he'd called Jeff in a state anything like this was to tell him that Iris had died. "They killed her. They set out to kill me and they killed her." It was what he said to everyone, and not just in those first twenty-four hours. That was the beginning of the disintegration: everything requisitioned by rage. But this is the end of it. The end—there was the news he had for his son. And for himself. The end of the expulsion from the previous life. To be content with something less grandiose than self-banishment and the overwhelming challenge that is to one's strength. To live with one's failure in a modest fashion, organized once again as a rational being and blotting out the blight and the indignation. If unyielding, unyielding quietly. Peacefully. Dignified contemplation—that's the ticket, as Faunia liked to say. To live in a way that does not bring Philoctetes to mind. He does not have to live like a tragic character in his course. That the primal seems a solution is not news-it always does. Everything changes with desire. The answer to all that has been destroyed. But choosing to prolong the scandal by perpetuating the protest? My stupidity everywhere. My derangement everywhere. And the grossest sentimentality. Wistfully remembering back to Steena. Jokingly dancing with Nathan Zuckerman.

Confiding in him. Reminiscing with him. Letting him listen.

Sharpening the writer's sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist's mind. Whatever catastrophe turns up, he transforms into writing. Catastrophe is cannon fodder for him.